Il primo ministro spagnolo annuncia che sta portando avanti per 4 anni il suo impegno del PIL del 2% per la difesa e inizierà invece ad applicarlo quest’anno

Key points to be considered:

• ⁠Of the total amount announced by the President, 35% will go to improving the working conditions, training and equipment of the Armed Forces “to bring them into line with the most advanced countries in the EU”; 31% will go to developing and acquiring telecommunications and cybersecurity capabilities; 19% to the manufacture and purchase of new defence and deterrence instruments; 17% to strengthening the role of our Armed Forces in the management of emergencies and natural disasters, such as floods or fires; and the remaining 3.14% to improving the security conditions of the almost 3,000 troops that make up Spain’s 16 peacekeeping missions abroad, under the flags of the European Union, NATO and the United Nations.

• ⁠This increase will bring the Defense spending from 1.4% to 2% in one single year.

• ⁠The President has also stressed that, as he promised on 26 March in parliament, not a single one of the 10,741 million extra euros will be taken away from social spending. Nor will taxes be raised or deficits incurred. The increase will be financed, according to his explanations, through the reorientation of some items of the recovery plan, such as the one earmarked for cybersecurity; with the savings generated by “the good performance of economic policy”, he has boasted, and with the margin given by items included in the General Budgets for 2023, doubly extended, which, he has said, “are no longer needed”, for example, compensation to the autonomous communities for the fall in tax revenue in the pandemic.

Good, only took more than two decades.

I would take this with a grain of salt tbh. He is saying that there won’t be a vote in Congress, and that this won’t raise taxes nor decrease social spending.

Adding to that, all the coalition parties of the government are against this, even the vice-president party has raised a complaint to congress.

Hope is free, but Sanchez doesn’t have a good track record on keeping his promises.

Good. After Yolanda Diaz’s comments on increased spending being helpful to nobody, I was getting worried that they had learned nothing.

We should have a EU minimum of defense spending, and lower investments until they are reached. We can’t keep having freeloaders on the union.

This is why having % of GDP spent on the military is a bad metric. +30% of the increase goes to increasing salaries. Does that improve the military capabilities of the country? Not really.

We should be discussing what we need given how warfare works in 2025. What industrial capabilities do we need? How many tanks? How many drones? What about the navy or cybersecurity? That should be determined first rather than setting a spending goal.

And we should do that on the EU level, instead of having 27 countries making their own plans. This is precisely why the EU has been a dysfunctional union since the 2008 crisis. We either make steps to federalize more and abandon the nation-state as the basis of politics, or we will keep being a dysfunctional union of countries until the union collapses with the rise of far right anti-EU countries. Making military plans together and pooling resources would allow us to remove unnecessary wasteful spending, get more value from what is spent.